300

We all know the legend of the 300 Spartan stories who fended off the godking Xerxes of Bad Prose. Clad in clean grammatical sandals and minimal adjectival leather, armed with the sharp blades of apt metaphor, they stymied the advance of the slave empire of RSS, and died martyrs to narrative in a news-obsessed world. And they had sexy abvs.

So forget 70 years after the defeat of Japan, even if in Beijing we're loving the blue skies fabricated for the occasion. Today we're celebrating 300 posts on the Anthill, since we launched in China just shy of three years ago. (Other anniversaries include ten years in China for fiction editor Tom Pellman, and seven years to the day since I first moved to Beijing.)

Week after next there will be a military parade on Tiananmen square in honour of our achievement. But until then here are six brave warriors from among the 300, which you might have missed before. They and others will also be collected in our anthology book, coming out at the end of the year from Earnshaw Books and with a big bash at the Beijing bookworm.

Lots of good new stuff in the pipeline in the coming months, including nonfiction by David Moser, Jeremiah Jenne, Jonathan Kos-Read and RFH, plus photography, fiction, poetry and translation. Sign up to the weekly email digest to not miss a beat, and share our Twitter and Facebook. Thanks for reading us! - Alec

Flower Town The rise and fall of a Sichuan village – by Sascha Matuszak

Finding Fabien  A supermodel is born – by Jon Rechtman

Big in Beijing  Tales from expat pond life – fiction by Carlos Ottery

My Father  Family history of the first gaokao – by Karoline Kan

Dumplings  A short story by Michael Salmon

Rice Fields  A poem by Tom Mangione